Darryl Toerien presented The pandemic as a portal to an online mindset on 3 December 2020 as part of the Lebanese Library Association’s 2020 Webinar Series – Online Education: What Librarians Need to Know – in collaboration with the Alliance of Levant Library Associations.
Abstract
In The Pandemic is A Portal, author Arundhati Roy dares us to view the pandemic as a portal through which to enter a new and better world, a world in which all of the UN Sustainable Development Goals have been met. For school librarians, this portal opens into an online world, which is both an opportunity and a challenge for us to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (Goal 4). The opportunity, and one that many school librarians leapt at, is to increase access to online resources. This was necessary, but it is not sufficient, because the challenge is for inclusive and equitable access to lead to inclusive and equitable use in the student’s information-to-knowledge journey (IFLA School Library Guidelines). The Guidelines approach this challenge by framing the information-to-knowledge journey through inquiry, which means that the pandemic has not fundamentally altered what we do, but has almost certainly fundamentally altered the ways in which we might go about doing it.
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